• DOI:10.1080/00497878.2019.1614871
• Corpus ID: 197699195

“Oh Dear, Yes!”: Mashing up Little Women, Vampires, and Werewolves

@article{DalyGaleano2019OhDY,
  title={“Oh Dear, Yes!”: Mashing up Little Women, Vampires, and Werewolves},
  author={Marlowe Daly-Galeano},
  journal={Women's Studies},
  year={2019},
  volume={48},
  pages={393 - 406}
}

• Marlowe Daly-Galeano
• Published 19 May 2019
• Art
• Women's Studies

For a brief period that began in 2009 with Seth Grahame-Smith and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, one could hardly escape the garish bookstore displays of horror mashups, featuring works like Jane Slayre and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens were all adapted into horror mashups. Although most mashed up works were nineteenth-century British novels, the fad also traveled to America. In 2010, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women became the subject of two mashup projects, Little Vampire Women and Little Women and Werewolves, coauthored by Lynn Messina and Porter Grand, respectively. These mashups, in their newness and ephemeral popularity, offer ways to conceptualize the enduring newness of Alcott’s 1868–69 Little Women, a groundbreaking novel in its day and one that continues to speak to readers. The surge of new adaptations and responses to Little Women, celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2018–19, reveals that today’s readers continue to find ways to relate to Alcott’s novel in the twenty-first century. The horror mashups, in contrast, illustrate the problems of the current moment: even as women’s issues and women’s stories occupy a visible stronghold, they are still subject to distrust and marginalization. Examining the ways horror mashups converse with both the newness and the long-enduring qualities of Little Women reveals some of the characteristics that make a text feel new. The ephemeral fad of the horror mashup demonstrates that the traits that allow a literary text to attain popularity in a particular moment are not the same ones that help a novel maintain popularity over time. Yet, in all of these texts, the authors and forms emphasize the importance of women’s stories and the cultural work they do. Today, we might question why women’s stories still unsettle modern readers.